Joseph E. Persico (20 page)

Astor made an immediate blunder. He went to the FBI, but at the wrong level. Since he was operating out of New York, Astor contacted Thomas Donegan of the bureau's office in that city and conveyed the President's desire for assistance in finding Kermit. Astor then called Director Hoover, annoyed by the bureau's slow pace in handling the case. On learning that Astor had talked to his New York subordinate first, Hoover became furious. The wellborn amateur was about to get a lesson from the humbly born Hoover in how these games were played. The director explained icily, “[A] thing like that ought not be given directly to our New York office. As a matter of fact if you'd called me . . . in the first instance, I would have arranged to put a special on right away . . . so that nobody in our New York office would necessarily know about it. . . . I know how a story like this if it got out by any chance would just be terribly embarrassing to the big boss. It's a kind of case that we usually handle in a little different way, that is, where there is a personal angle involved I generally will send some personal representative directly from Washington so he can go ahead and handle it without anybody locally knowing what it is all about you see. . . .” Astor's mistake was that he had failed to bring a scandal in the President's family directly to Hoover. The director's expertise at such matters would not only increase Roosevelt's indebtedness to him, but Hoover's awareness of this presidential dirty linen would make FDR wary of ever attacking him. That was how Hoover's dossiers worked from the President on down. Hoover also used the conversation with Astor to jab an emerging rival as America's spymaster. He accused Astor of supporting Bill Donovan and said, “Now I don't know anything about the Colonel Donovan situation and I, of course, care less. But the point about it is if they want Colonel Donovan to come in or if they want you to come in or they want Smith or Brown . . . hell, I'll wire my resignation tonight if that's the way the President feels about it. . . . The job doesn't mean enough to me.” Astor backed down, and responded meekly, “Anything that I said which may have been improper, I was mad that night myself, all I can do, I apologize to you in blank. . . .” In the end, Hoover got a personal plea for help with Kermit's disappearance from the White House, but not directly from the President.

By now, FDR's adoring and adored secretary, Missy LeHand, was no longer on the scene. The month before, June 4, 1941, she had been felled by a stroke in front of the President at a White House party, an affliction that ultimately killed her. In the meantime, her premier position in the President's office was assumed by Grace Tully, perhaps lacking Missy's innate femininity, but a first-rate executive secretary. Tully has been vividly sketched by Sam Rosenman: “She was Irish, very devout Catholic. She had an Irish temper, and one of her virtues, as well as one of her faults, was her directness with people. . . . She was militant in her devotion to Roosevelt; she had a very good humor and was good company, inclined to drink a little too much on occasion and show it, nothing really disreputable, but if she had two or three drinks, she'd get very loquacious.” FDR referred to Tully as “The Duchess.” It was Tully whom the President told to call Hoover and ask him to handle the search for Kermit personally. By having her call Hoover, FDR managed to keep himself one layer removed from direct intervention in a mess. It was a tactic that Hoover, a fellow adept, could not fail to admire.

The FBI found Kermit Roosevelt and kept him under surveillance for a month, especially since his inamorata was believed to be German and a potential spy. Vincent Astor learned from the episode both that J. Edgar Hoover was no man to have as an enemy and that the director bitterly resented Bill Donovan. What he could not know was that his role, indeed the whole treatment of this embarrassing incident involving the President's family, was placed in Hoover's personal files. Astor's conversations with the director had been recorded by a listening device on Hoover's phone. Bill Donovan might have once dismissed Hoover as a mere clerk, but a critic once described the FBI chief as America's “most dangerous file clerk.” Hoover's final judgment on Donovan's COI was equally harsh: He described its creation as “Roosevelt's folly.”

It was in the realm of political intelligence that Hoover continued to be most useful to the President. In September 1941, at FDR's direction, Adolf Berle contacted Ed Tamm, Hoover's number three aide, to ask the bureau to provide inside information on any congressional opponents of the administration's foreign policy. Within a day, the director himself got back to Berle. “There was no indication,” Hoover said, “of any revolt on matters relating to the foreign policy. The President can have anything and everything he wants, at least through the present term of Congress. . . . Opposition to appropriation bills will probably depend upon how specifically these bills provide for British aid, since there seems to be a growing anti-British sentiment.” The director gave no hint of how his organization managed to penetrate the confidential councils of Congress. Hoover was further able to tip off the President to an upcoming congressional investigation “into the entire motion picture industry in order to show that the Administration had been using the movies as a vehicle to propagate information about the War.”

In October, Bill Donovan lost another turf battle, along with yielding intelligence operations in Latin America to Hoover. Nelson Rockefeller, the thirty-three-year-old grandson of the richest American, John D. Rockefeller, and himself an aficionado of Latin America, persuaded FDR to create still another agency, the Office for Coordination of Commercial and Cultural Relations Between the American Republics. The energetic and ambitious Rockefeller became head of the new agency, which was subsequently more trimly renamed the Office of the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. Donovan had managed to add to his COI charter psychological warfare to be conducted via radio. He and Rockefeller were thus running overlapping broadcasting operations to win the hearts of Latinos. To trump Donovan, Rockefeller used a tactic that he picked up from Henry Wallace while playing tennis with the Vice President. Wallace had advised “what you ought to do is . . . give him [FDR] something that's ready to be signed.” Rockefeller, a quick study, presented just such a pre-emptive letter to the President on October 15. FDR read it, made a few minor changes, and sent it that day to Bill Donovan. The letter began: “It appears that some question has been raised as to the fields of responsibility of your work and that of Nelson Rockefeller's organization. . . . Propaganda by radio or any other media directed at Latin America should be handled exclusively by the Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs. . . .” Donovan had now been kicked out of the Western Hemisphere on the ground by Hoover and in the air by Rockefeller.

He was in for one more stumble. Donovan wanted to recruit Henry Field, a leading anthropologist and Middle East expert. He invited Field to his Georgetown home and began his soft-spoken, persuasive sales pitch. Much to his astonishment and annoyance, he failed to make a sale. He already had a job in the government, Field explained. As he later described Donovan's reaction to this rare rejection, “Wild Bill's face got red, his eyes blazed and he drew a letter from his pocket signed ‘Franklin D. Roosevelt,' authorizing him to recruit anyone, anywhere, for his mission.” Field then pulled out his own letter, demonstrating that he was already working for an intelligence operation run directly by the President. Donovan, as Field recalled, “was very amazed. . . .” Thus the director of the COI learned of the existence of John Franklin Carter's ring and that his agency was not the only espionage fiefdom spawned in the Oval Office.

Chapter IX

“Our Objective Is to Get America into the War”

ALL THAT the White House staff, including the Secret Service detail, was told on August 3, 1941, was that FDR was boarding the presidential yacht,
Potomac,
for a ten-day fishing trip off Cape Cod. Before leaving, the President had written his mother, Sara, “The heat in Washington has been fairly steady and I long to sleep under a blanket for the first time since May.” Washington mythology had it that the British, who knew something about torrid outposts, paid a tropical supplement to their diplomats posted to the American capital and that the ambassador performed his duties in khaki shorts and a pith helmet.

The composition of the small presidential party appeared to confirm the purpose of the boat trip. Pa Watson, Admiral Ross McIntire, FDR's physician, and Captain John Beardall, his naval aide, were all avid fishermen. To McIntire, “There was nothing about the start of the trip to make us think it was other than the usual thing.” Just prior to their departure, FDR “told me that he was going to take a little trip up through the Cape Cod Canal,” Eleanor Roosevelt recalled. “Then he smiled and I knew he was not telling me all that he was going to do.”

On August 4 the President's party did put into the New Bedford Yacht Club for some fishing and a picnic. There, Roosevelt welcomed aboard the attractive and amiable Princess Martha of Sweden. After her brief visit, he changed the flashy shirts he favored when fishing for a white shirt and tie. The final sartorial touch was the regulation Navy cape with velvet collar and braid frogs given to him by his cousin Colonel Henry Roosevelt, who was now serving, in the family tradition, as assistant secretary of the Navy. Getting a man confined to a wheelchair in and out of an overcoat was a clumsy business, and the cape had been an inspired alternative. As the vessel steamed out of New Bedford harbor, a flotilla of five destroyers and the heavy cruiser USS
Augusta
rose over the horizon. The
Potomac
came alongside the cruiser and the President was piped aboard. He was greeted on the quarterdeck by the leadership of the American armed forces: General George Marshall, Army Chief of Staff; Admiral Harold Stark, Chief of Naval Operations; Admiral Ernest King, commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet; and General Henry Arnold, commander of the Army Air Forces. The flotilla then swung north, headed toward rough seas off Newfoundland. The sea was FDR's element, and he tended to gather around him seafaring men whom he had known when he served as assistant secretary of the Navy. He had first met Stark as a young lieutenant commanding a destroyer. Once, while aboard another destroyer, the
Flusser,
Roosevelt had offered to take the ship between the narrow strait separating Campobello Island and the Maine coast. He knew these waters well, he said. The
Flusser
's skipper, Lieutenant William F. Halsey Jr., suspected there was a difference between handling a sailboat and piloting a warship. But he later wrote of the incident: “As Mr. Roosevelt made his first turn, I saw him look aft and check the swing of our stern. My worries were over; he knew his business.” Years earlier, when FDR visited the Pan Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, his personal aide had been Husband E. Kimmel, now commanding naval forces at Pearl Harbor.

Steaming toward the
Augusta,
aboard the Royal Navy's new battleship, the
Prince of Wales,
rode Winston Churchill, eager to find out what Franklin Roosevelt was really like. What stuff was he made of? How deep was his abhorrence of Hitler? How likely was he to join Britain in fighting Nazism? The month before, the President had delivered a strong message to Congress that had heartened Churchill. The sea lanes from the United States to Iceland, Roosevelt had declared, had to be kept open and protected against even a “threat of attack.” He had then left it to the Navy to figure out what constituted a threat. Admiral Stark was called to the White House, where he hoped for clarification. Just what did the commander in chief expect of the Navy? “To some of my very pointed questions,” Stark later wrote a friend, “which all of us would like to have answered, I get a smile or ‘Betty, please don't ask me that.'” What Stark guessed, and what FDR was not eager to spell out, was that he wanted the U.S. Navy to patrol four fifths of the Atlantic Ocean for the British. Admiral Ernest King, the fleet commander, was careful not to underestimate the President's intentions. King simply ordered the fleet to go after any German submarine or raider close by or at “reasonably longer distances. . . .” This long arm of the American naval patrol served Britain well, but Churchill, as he approached the American ships, wanted more.

On Saturday morning, August 9, the
Augusta
and
Prince of Wales
came alongside each other. On the deck of the American warship stood Franklin Roosevelt, supported on the arm of his son Elliott, who had been waiting aboard the cruiser. Elliott, the first Roosevelt son to enter the military, had by then been on active duty almost a year, and had made a small declaration of independence by joining the Army Air Forces rather than his father's favored Navy, and without FDR's knowledge. A cosmetic ruse had been employed on this trip to minimize the President's handicap. His metal leg braces had been painted black to blend with dark shoes and socks.

As Churchill strode up the gangway to the upper deck the
Augusta
's band struck up “God Save the Queen.” The two leaders beamed and shook hands warmly. As they chatted, Ed Starling, chief of the White House Secret Service detail, was sitting in a deck chair on the
Potomac
's fantail, headed back to the mainland. A battered fedora was perched on Starling's head, the trademark FDR cigarette holder clamped between his teeth, and a cloak like the President's draped over his shoulders. Starling's impersonation was the first time that a double had been used to conceal FDR's whereabouts. Roosevelt had taken great delight in the deception. The year before, he had boasted to his confidant Daisy Suckley of how he had fooled the press while making a secret tour of Atlantic defense zones. He had told his press officer to release in advance his itinerary before he boarded the
Tuscaloosa
out of Pensacola, Florida. From the ship he wrote Suckley, “We have all been laughing at the complete ignorance and gullibility of the press! They fell for the visit to the Andaman Islands (Indian Ocean), Celebes (North Pacific) and South Hebrides (Antarctic) and believe it or not, the Cherubic Isles from Edward Lear's
Book of Nonsense
!”

FDR mentioned to Churchill that they had met before at Gray's Inn during Roosevelt's 1918 visit to England. The Prime Minister said that he had no recollection of the occasion, which took the proud President aback. Reading the disappointment in FDR's face, Churchill quickly refreshed his memory and claimed, yes, he vividly remembered Roosevelt's “magnificent presence in all his youth and strength.”

The Churchill whom FDR was meeting, essentially for the first time, was a man straddling two centuries in age and manner. He was now sixty-six. He had stood in the crowd celebrating Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887. He became a national hero at age twenty-five after his well-publicized escape from the Boers in South Africa during their failed struggle against the British. He entered Parliament at age twenty-seven. He subsequently held an impressive array of posts—undersecretary for colonies, privy councillor, home secretary, First Lord of the Admiralty, minister of munitions, and chancellor of the Exchequer. The Admiralty post had nearly been his undoing when, after the bloody disaster in the Dardanelles in 1915, he had been relieved. He thereafter went into the trenches in France with the Grenadier Guards. He took to soldiering much as he had as a young man and seemed heedless of death. He was a man of fleeting moods, shifting from bursts of euphoria to bouts of depression that he called his “black dog.” While still in the trenches and contemplating his political future, he wrote his wife, Clementine: “I am so devoured by egoism.” Yet, he confessed to his physician, Lord Moran, a latent self-destructive impulse. “I don't like standing near the edge of a platform when an express train is passing through,” he told Moran. “I don't like to stand by the side of a ship and look down into the water. A second's action would end everything, a few drops of desperation.”

FDR could let his hair down with Daisy Suckley, whom he once told, with unintended callousness, that he could tell her anything because she didn't know anything. She was fifty years old at the time of FDR's meeting with Churchill, a maiden lady only distantly related but always introduced by Roosevelt as his “Cousin Daisy.” She was genteel, prudish, and judgmental. Fortunately, a basic decency and kindness counterbalanced her inclination to brand people too quickly as “common” or “coarse,” terms she applied especially to Jews. It was to Daisy that FDR wrote his first impression after lunching alone with Churchill aboard the
Augusta.
“He is a tremendously vital person and in many ways is an English Mayor LaGuardia. Don't say I said so!” he told her. “I like him and lunching alone broke ice both ways.”

Churchill, like FDR, had a taste for the clandestine. The historian Ronald Lewin writes: “. . . [A]ll that was romantic in [Churchill] . . . thrilled to the excitement of intercepted signals, delphic reports from agents, broken code. . . . the same impulse drew him to mavericks and buccaneers, unorthodox figures who defied convention. . . . they appealed to his craving for the flamboyant, the adventuresome, the unusual, the unconventional; cloaked in secrecy, their attraction was doubly potent.” The description could just as easily have mantled FDR.

Almost daily, British aircraft dropped Ultra decrypts for the Prime Minister onto the deck of the
Prince of Wales.
The box they came in was weighted so that if the plane crashed and sank the box would sink too. Churchill did not share all these secrets with FDR. By now, American and British codebreakers had supposedly reached an agreement for a “free exchange of intelligence.” But with Britain's cryptanalysts so far ahead, Churchill felt that too free an exchange might become a one-way street. He had recently roared at one of his aides, “Are we going to throw all our secrets into the American lap? If so, I am against it. It would be very much better to go slow, as we have far more to give than they.”

When the President and Prime Minister finally sat down to work at the
Augusta
's wardroom table, first on the agenda was Japan. The month before, forty thousand Japanese troops had seized Indochina with its vast rubber resources. FDR had retaliated by freezing Japanese assets in the United States and cutting off the sale of high-octane airplane fuel to Japan. Still, as the President had told his interior secretary, Harold Ickes, at the time, his goal was not war in the Pacific: “I simply have not got enough Navy to go around—and every little episode in the Pacific means fewer ships in the Atlantic.” He said to Churchill that a fight with Japan would be “the wrong war in the wrong ocean at the wrong time.” The PM agreed. Their first objective must be to defeat Hitler.

All that the public was later told of the secret meeting at sea was that it had produced a ringing declaration, the Atlantic Charter, released to the press on August 14. Roosevelt and Churchill had agreed that their nations sought no other country's territory, nor any changes in other territories without the freely expressed wishes of their inhabitants. They supported the right of all peoples to choose their own form of government, and they pledged to promote free trade, disarmament, and a permanent system of security for the world. These goals were to follow “the final destruction of the Nazi tyranny,” the continuing priority. Churchill was only too delighted to wed Britain publicly to the United States in these lofty sentiments. But it was his private agenda that had dominated his sessions with FDR on the
Augusta.
Britain's sea losses had so far totaled a nearly fatal fifteen hundred ships sunk by mid-1941. FDR promised the PM that American warships would not only protect British convoys, but that they would patrol as far as three hundred miles into the Atlantic
to seek out and attack
German submarines.

Upon his return to London, Churchill told Sir Dudley Pound, First Sea Lord, “Our objective is to get the Americans into the war. . . . We can settle best how to fight it afterwards.” He assured his cabinet that Roosevelt “was obviously determined to come in.” He further reported, “The President had said that he would wage war but not declare it, and that he would become more and more provocative. If the Germans did not like it, they could attack the American forces.” As far as Churchill was concerned, FDR had all but declared war against Germany, at least on the high seas.

Three weeks after the Atlantic conference, the USS
Greer,
a destroyer of World War I vintage, camouflaged in shades of gray, was sailing from Boston to Iceland to deliver mail to the forty-four hundred American Marines FDR had sent there nearly eight weeks before. Off Iceland, a British patrol plane signaled the
Greer
that a U-boat lay ten miles ahead. The destroyer began tracking the German sub, reporting its position back to the plane. The plane dropped four depth charges without scoring a hit and left to refuel. The
Greer
continued to pursue the submarine. The U-boat's captain, believing the depth charge attack had been made by the destroyer, then fired torpedoes at the
Greer,
unsuccessfully. The
Greer
then fired several depth charges with equal lack of success before breaking off the engagement. Since the U-boat had remained submerged throughout the fight, its skipper never knew who had attacked him first, aircraft or ship, British or American.

Roosevelt chose a fireside chat on September 11 to exploit the incident. He had intended to make the radio talk sooner, but his beloved mother, Sara, had died four days before. Her influence on his life was incalculable. She was a physically imposing woman, almost five feet ten, a great beauty in her day, and with a character to match her stature. Even after FDR became president, she still controlled his money. She always sat at the head of the family table, a grande dame, imperious and accustomed to reign. When her sister was stranded in Europe by the outbreak of war in 1939, she simply could not understand why Franklin did not send a battleship to fetch his aunt. The loss of his mother struck FDR hard, and he remained in seclusion at his home in Hyde Park for several days before returning to Washington for the radio address.